This seems almost scam quality – only time will tell if it is just another pipe dream.
From WUWT Tips and Notes by J B Williamson;
A small British company has produced the first “petrol from air” using a revolutionary technology that promises to solve the energy crisis as well as helping to curb global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Air Fuel Synthesis in Stockton-on-Tees has produced five litres of petrol since August when it switched on a small refinery that manufactures gasoline from carbon dioxide and water vapour.
The company hopes that within two years it will build a larger, commercial-scale plant capable of producing a ton of petrol a day. It also plans to produce green aviation fuel to make airline travel more carbon-neutral.
UPDATE: In comments, Ric Werme points out:
Also interesting – http://www.21stcentech.com/military-update-did-a-cancer-researcher-inspire-the-navy-to-turn-seawater-into-jet-fuel/
The Naval Research Laboratory is using an electrochemical acidification cell (see image below) to take seawater through a two-step process to capture carbon dioxide and produce hydrogen gas. Carbon dioxide is concentrated in seawater at levels 140 times greater than in the atmosphere. A portion of it is carbonic acid and carbonate, but most is bicarbonate. Harvesting all that carbon coupled with the hydrogen is what the electrochemical acidification cell does employing a catalyst similar to that used to create synthetic oil from coal but with much greater efficiency.
Do you really wanna go there?
(Prof. Emeritus George Miley would disagree for instance)
.
When you burn petroleum products you get water vapor and CO2 because that’s lower in energy than hydrocarbons and molecular oxygen. If they want to synthesize hydrocarbons from air, they have to climb back up that energy hill. What is the energy source for climbing this hill? If the energy source is manmade, then you are just burning energy to push a ball back up a hill to let it roll back down.
Smells like a scam.
K.I.S.S. principle. Keep it simple, stupid.
Hydrolyze H2O into H2 + O2 and either combust it or invent an efficient fuel cell to capture the energy.
At best, the proposal in the article is too highly energy intensive with multiple costly steps. More likely it is fraud looking for a grant, with the promise of cold fusion and perpetual motion.
I think that pulling Co2 out of the atmosphere is a very bad idea we would be pulling so much out eventually that we risk killing the plants we need to live on.
Plants already combine CO2 and water. The next step is geological, but in the end, that’s what all our fossil fuels come from.
I don’t see how this will scale up into anything economical (I’m skeptical, after all) but I’ll wait and see before passing judgement.
Don’t plants stop growing at 150-180 ppm? The carbophobics don’t realize that we came within 100 ppm or so of becoming extinct.
@ur momisugly Robert of Ottawa
The gain isn’t in absolute energy, the gain is supposed to be in efficiency of transportation and storage.
Electricity can not be used as a vehicle fule with any efficience because you have loses in both transportation to the vehicle and storage in the vehicle. There is no know way to store electricity without loses over time even with no load.
This is essentially a scheme for powering vehicles with electricity by converting electricity into a liquid fule.
One of the entrants into the Progressive automotive X-prize was pushing a similar scheme using an amonia based fule. Their plan was not to use ambient C02, but to co locat production plants with fossil power plants using the C02 rich exhaust as well as electricity from the plant as inputs.
I don’t know all the math involved so I don’t know if the supposed gains in transportation and storage using electricity -> liquid fule -> vehicle over electricity -> vehicle are real or not.
As happened with the ventilated roof a few weeks ago, commenters are wilfully misinterpreting the article so as to take a sideswipe at renewables. Warming skepticism is not incompatible with a green stance. There are many benefits from renewables other than the CO2 issue. Because they are long-term factors they get overlooked but are no less important for that. Mitigating the dependence on imported oil, gas or coal is one. Facing up to peak oil and subsequent oil price hikes is another. Distributed production allows for a robust energy network with high tolerance to redundancy- a factor that impacts on a country’s ability to defend itself.
For what it’s worth, I think the petrol-from-air idea won’t be proved viable but no one knows that until the research is done. There are a lot of ‘if’s’ but at least the researchers state them or at least allude to them.
They make several points very clearly:
– The process requires an energy input. We all know that this means the air and water vapour in their petrol form are energy vectors, just like hydrogen from electrolysis used in fuel cells. There’s no attempt to suggest it’s free energy. The only make-or-break issue with regard to input/output is the efficiency ratio. It’s always less than 100% but that doesn’t make it unviable as a way of making fuel.
– They are looking at niche markets. This is an indication that they realise they might not be able to change the world but acknowledge that every little helps. Sure, the researcher says it might transform the economic and environmental landscape of Britain but it’s OK to live in hope of greater things if you have identified a workable scenario at a more modest level.
– The researcher was acknowledging the cost/benefit issue in relation to rising oil prices: “You’re in a market place where the only way is up for the price of fossil oil and at some point there will be a crossover where our fuel becomes cheaper.” In other words he is conceding that for a time it might not be viable but at a point in the future it could be. There’s nothing wrong with that observation, given his 15 year horizon with regard to working towards a commercial scale refinery.
Mr Harrison, the researcher, sounds perfectly sensible in everything he says. The fact that the Institution of Mechanical Engineers has gone up there and verified it for themselves suggests strongly that the process is not whacky science, free energy or totally unworkable in the real world. Rather, that it is probably a long shot but more research will tell. This is all sensible, guarded optimism for something that might work at least in a niche market a long way in the future.
Mr Harrison also says, “It looks and smells like petrol but it’s a much cleaner and clearer product than petrol derived from fossil oil”. I suspect it is composed entirely of short chain hydrocarbons due to being built up from CO2 and H2O as opposed to the conventional fossil fuel refinement process of cracking whereby long chain hydrocarbons are broken into smaller ones. The trouble with cracking is that some longer chain molecules remain, hence the “nasty bits” that Mr Harrison refers to. These are what make petrol burn inefficiently and produce pollutants such as soot particulates. In other words, this process is producing cleaner fuel, hence the references to aviation fuel and racing grade fuel. I was going to mention in my list of benefits above that renewable fuels reduce other pollutants such as NOX gasses and soot particulates. I thought better of it because this is essentially petrol. However, that benefit does apply if this is indeed a higher grade, cleaner fuel (and is produced using renewables).
The greens don’t get off scott free in my book though. Unfortunately, bias and spin abound on both sides of the debate. The Independent surreptitiously slops another coat of green on a report that is already looking quite environmentally friendly: As with the Daily Mail article about the 16 year flatlining temps the other day, I think the Independent is sailing close to the wind in making their own observations appear to be at one with the person they are writing about. Notice that the reporter says (ie. not Mr Harrison’s words):
” Being able to capture carbon dioxide from the air, and effectively remove the principal industrial greenhouse gas resulting from the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, has been the holy grail of the emerging green economy.”
This is inserted cleverly between one of Mr. Harrison’s, admittedly, more breathless assertions and a reported summary of Mr Harrison talking about “using the extracted carbon dioxide”. I was caught out reading that first time round. I thought Mr Harrison was acknowledging that he was gallantly embarking on scrubbing all the man-made CO2 out of the atmosphere for us. Of course, he’s not- he knows the CO2 gets spewed straight back out as exhaust. He knows it’s CO2 neutral, which is good but isn’t the same as “Remov[ing] the principle greenhouse gas from tbe burning of fossil fuels…”. Only the Independent asserts that and should be ashamed of themselves for trying to put it into the heads of their readers.
Scute
An aside: I was involved in some modeling for a methanol-from-atmosphere plant a long time ago at NASA. The goal was to get pure CO2 out of the Martian atmosphere and turn it into rocket fuel — CO+O2 or CH4+O2 — for a return trip. The amount of energy involved was gigantic, and only made sense because it is cheaper to produce electricity on Mars than to send up all the fuel from Earth. But rockets can’t burn electricity, you need chemical fuel (one reason to be excited about water on mars is that then you don’t need to bring hydrogen for your methane production).
There were two issues: purifying the nearly-pure CO2 atmosphere, and then converting pure CO2 to bipropellant. Well, and doing this flawlessly, since you couldn’t count on Bruce Willis smacking the plant with a sledgehammer whenever it broke.
On Earth, this invention is basically equivalent to the biofuels stuff. Biofuels use solar power to convert atmospheric CO2 to liquid fuel; the work this group is doing can use geothermal or fusion power instead (or coal, but that would be stupid), and probably uses a lot less land than jatropha or sugar.
Financial News 2050
World shortage of carbon dioxide! The price of carbon dioxide shot up on the commodities market as the amount in the atmosphere fell to an all time low. Food prices have also soared as crops fail to grow.
Carbon Dioxide is a market controlled almost entirely by China – 97% of the worlds output now comes from China.
See http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4087
This is basically how they make it.
http://www.airfuelsynthesis.com/technology/technical-review.html
Scaled-up plants are expected to work from a commercial source of waste CO2.
Site update following all the media hype –
http://www.airfuelsynthesis.com/news/83-petrol-from-air-an-update.html
It looks technically possible but the real-world energy input availability and costs don’t stack up.from my chair… And I’m not happy about anything that robs plants of their dinner ‘cos those plants become my dinner either before or after additional processing by a herbivore…
match this up with fusion power plants that “are just round the corner” and you convert electricity that is “too cheep to meeter” into a useful fuel. 🙂
Benjamin Braddock, I’ve got one word for you: Thorium.
Steve Garcia
Chemistry OK, Technology possible, Economics??
The chemistry of obtaining hydrogen and carbon dioxide from sea water is sound. e.g. See in the studies by Meyer Steinberg on CO2 Fuel from the 1960s onward. For a popular discussion see Carbon neutral fuel
The challenge is getting the source energy to do so, and in bringing the costs down far enough to make this cost effective. Steinberg was exploring nuclear power.
“No! it is NOT “viable”. It uses more energy than it produces. You need to look up ‘perpetual motion’ if you don’t understand why this makes it non-viable.”
Putting aside the “if it actually works” question, Its a possible avenue for waste energy scavenged from other systems, or from sources like windmills that can’t reliably be used for baseline production.
But as I say “If”……
This is a variation of the Sabatier process that has been known for a long time. As other poster’s have posited it takes more energy to make than it delivers. However, if we had a serious nuclear program, Thorium and Fusion, this would not be a problem and would be a carbon neutral means of creating portable energy that is better for the environment than batteries. Just to be sure, just making CH4 using the Sabatier process and then using that in fuel cells would be far more efficient from a total energy standpoint.
This is not that new. Improved catalysts for this sort of thing are reported regularly. Omitted from the short excerpts above are the power source. Usually the power source is electricity, which if generated from PV panels or wind turbines, provides another way to store the unpredictable energy for later use, or to use it as fuel. There are catalysts that are powered directly by sunlight, without the need for the PV panels and wires between sun and catalyst. The laws of thermodynamics are not violated.
As with everything else, the next step is cheap mass production. If they can achieve that, the technology will spread without tax subsidy.
In some promotional literature, it’s called “artificial photosynthesis” instead of “alchemy”.
The passage graph that accompanied the release appears to be absolute nonsense, geared to extract taxpayers money via grants.
Safety Tip: DO NOT LET THE DOE SEE THIS GRAPH.
It is useful to remember that in some parts of the world liquid fuel supplies are both unreliable and expensive. This is likely to first prove economically viable, if it ever does, in places we don’t usually think about, like Pacific Islands, or the coasts of Africa or Chile.
In effect hydrocarbon production from renewable energy sources can be considered a high density liquid battery – storing that energy for later or for distant use. Batteries are never 100% efficient round-trip, incidentally, and if the energy source is renewable, fuel cost isn’t the issue (sunlight and wind are free), just the one-time cost of the collection/production infrastructure. The gain is in a carbon-neutral transportation fuel – and transportation represents a significant chunk of CO2 emissions.
A distributed wind system can provide baseline power at about 1/3 to 1/2 it’s average power level (shown in Archer & Jacobson 2007, http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/winds_distributed_jamc.pdf) – if the other 1/2 to 2/3 average power were devoted to producing methanol or petrol that would be a good use of the baseline excess. Or it could be even be run in gas turbines for load balancing.
I think the key quote is this:
“We are converting renewable electricity into a more versatile, useable and storable form of energy, namely liquid transport fuels.”
So it doesn’t matter if it takes more energy input 🙂
Espen says:
If the process uses the input energy efficiently (something I really, really doubt) this could perhaps be an interesting alternative to batteries, a way to store energy from solar and wind power on the days they actually deliver.
I suspect a more important factor would be how well the process handles an energy supply which can vary on a second by second basis.
Energy efficiency is meaningless as long as the energy input is coming from anything you don’t have to buy, such as sunlight. The only meaningful measure is the cost of producing the fuel. There are no laws of physics that prevent the design of a device that uses CO2, water, and sunlight to produce some useful liquid fuel such as methanol, ethanol, or even octane. Even if such a device were initially too expensive to be practical, the Japanese are masters at production engineering and may be able to turn the thing into a viable consumer product as they did with the video tape recorder – originally invented by Ampex and costing $6,000 apiece back in the 1960s.
Imagine the loss of tax revenues such a device would cause. Governments would spend billions trying to figure out how and what to tax.
michaelozanne says:
October 19, 2012 at 9:30 am
> “No! it is NOT “viable”. It uses more energy than it produces. You need to look up ‘perpetual motion’ if you don’t understand why this makes it non-viable.”
Did you see my post above at 5:19 am?
Have you priced the cost of delivering jet fuel to an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific? I think it makes all sorts of sense to use excess energy to make jet fuel while an aircraft carrier is traveling to a destination, and using the fuel once it gets there.
No tankers, perpetual motion, or other magic is necessary.
What process doesn’t “use” more energy than it produces? Waste heat and entropy are everywhere, yet there are many processes that are viable despite that.